8. One more cause of heaviness is mentioned by many of those who were termed mystic authors. And the notion has crept in, I know not how, even among plain people who have no acquaintance with them. I cannot better explain this, than in the words of a late writer, who relates this, as her own experience. “I continued so happy in my Beloved, that altho’ I should have been forced to live a vagabond in a desert, I should have found no difficulty in it. This state had not lasted long, when in effect, I found myself led into a desert.――I found myself in a forlorn condition, altogether poor, wretched and miserable.――The proper source of this grief is, the knowledge of ourselves, by which we find, that there is an extreme unlikeness between God and us. We see ourselves most opposite to him, and that our inmost soul is entirely corrupted, depraved and full of all kind of evil and malignity, of the world and flesh and all sorts of abominations:” from hence it has been inferred, That the knowledge of ourselves, without which we should perish everlastingly, _must_ even after we have attained justifying faith, occasion the deepest heaviness. 9. But upon this I would observe, 1. In the preceding paragraph, this writer says, “Hearing I had not a true faith in Christ, I offered myself up to God, and immediately felt his love.” It may be so; and yet it does not appear, That this was justification. ’Tis more probable, it was no more then what are usually termed the _drawings of the Father_. And if so, the heaviness and darkness which followed, was no other than conviction of sin, which in the nature of things must precede that faith whereby we are justified. 2. Suppose she was justified almost the same moment she was convinced of wanting faith, there was then no time for that gradually increasing self-knowledge which uses to precede justification. In this case therefore it came after, and was probably the more severe, the less it was expected. 3. It is allowed, there will be a far deeper, a far clearer and fuller knowledge of our inbred sin, of our total corruption by nature, after justification, than ever there was before it. But this need not occasion darkness of soul: I will not say That it _must_ bring us into heaviness. Were it so, the apostle would not have used that expression, _if need be_: for there would be an absolute, indispensable need of it, for all that would know themselves: that is in effect, for all that would know the perfect love of God, and be thereby _made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light_. But this is by no means the case: On the contrary, God may increase the knowledge of ourselves to any degree, and increase in the same proportion the knowledge of himself and the experience of his love. And in this case, there would be no “desert, no misery, no forlorn condition;” but love and peace and joy gradually springing up into everlasting life.